Helen Marie Newman

Artist, Community worker, Gallery educator, Journalist, Technician

Helen Marie Newman is a British visual artist predominately working in cermaic sculpture and drawing. Her work studies the nature of tactile materials and how as humans we use our bodies to create a relationship with materials to make an object.

Biography

Helen Marie Newman is a British visual artist predominately working in cermaic sculpture and drawing. Her work studies the nature of tactile materials and how as humans we use our bodies to create a relationship with materials to make an object.

Newman takes huge influence from her childhood growing up studying her parents approach of transforming everyday materials into something new. “I consider my role as an artist as a person at play. I treat the studio much like a person pottering in their shed, taking influence from my Father’s D.I.Y mentality of making something out of anything approach.”

Through modes of play with tactile materials her intention is never to make anything that looks likes something, but more to analyse how materials react to her hands through play, making and touch to find their own way of turning into an object and finding their own characteristics.

Human interaction with materials is a large factor of Newman’s work. Currently working with clay she examines how the material moulds with her hands, inspecting how every mark made the clay preserves it, containing a history of her making. Newman lives and works in Manchester, UK and completed a residency in 2016 at the Whitworth. She has also recently completed a solo show ‘Contact’ at Sloe Gallery and shortlisted for The Greater Manchester Art Prize 2017.